At the end of my piece in the new Jacobin, I quoted Joan Robinson’s “Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist.” It’s well out of print, and I think it deserves to be online in full, so here it is.

According to John King’s History of Post-Keynesian Economics [2002: p. 50], this originated as a letter to Ronald Meek, a Marxian economist of Kiwi origin, incidentally from my home town of Wellington. It was published by the Students’ Bookshop at Cambridge in a pamphlet called On Re-reading Marx, along with a couple of other Robinson pieces, in a small edition which sold out, she later said, in seventeen years. I got it from her Collected Economic Papers, Volume IV.

I like to see it, against the title, as a stern letter among comrades, rather than a dismissal of one school by another. Robinson says here she has Marx in her bones, and she means it. She is one of those people who moved progressively to the left with age (even unfortunately becoming enthusiastic about Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s), and this letter of 1953 finds her halfway along the road. In the 1930s she had mocked Marxian critics of Keynes’s General Theory for not wanting to believe capitalism’s unemployment problem could be solved with the right policy. Here, she has evidently changed her mind. She had begun her career as a Marshallian, would witness first-hand Keynes’s miracle at Cambridge in the 1930s and become something of a Saint Paul, only to eventually prefer and promote the Marxish Michal Kalecki’s presentation of the theory of effective demand, which had been inspired by the reproduction schema of Capital, Volume II. Marx was very much in the air of the 1930s Cambridge Economics department, in spite of Keynes’ dismissiveness, thanks to the trio of Kalecki, Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb.